Jets of particles streaming from black holes in far-away galaxies operate differently than previously thought, according to a study published recently in Nature.

High above the flat Milky Way galaxy, bright galaxies called blazars dominate the gamma-ray sky, discrete spots on the dark backdrop of the universe. As nearby matter falls into the black hole at the center of a blazar, “feeding” the black hole, it sprays some of this energy back out into the universe as a jet of particles.

“As the universe’s biggest accelerators, blazar jets are important to understand,” said Masaaki Hayashida, a corresponding author on the Nature paper and a research fellow with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrphysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). “But how they are produced and how they are structured is not well understood. We’re still looking to understand the basics.”

Researchers had previously theorized that such jets are held together by strong magnetic field tendrils, while the jet’s light is created by particles revolving around these wisp-thin magnetic field “lines.”